For the photo journalism project, I decided to explore photographs that I took in travels through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan 30 years ago.

After college, in 1977-78, I lived in Mashhad Iran for a year, with my older brother. I worked as an ESL instructor for the British Council. The work load was not very heavy, which was fine with me, since my main reason for being there was to experience another culture.

Mashhad is in the east of Iran, on the way to Herat, Afghanistan. It was a stop on the ancient Silk Road, and an important Shiite pilgrimage site - the tomb of Imam Reza is there. Incongruously, it was also on the 'hippie route' from Europe to India. North of us, the Soviet border was closed, and south to the ocean was largely desert. So every trekker and hippie on his or her way to Goa stopped in, quite a few of them camped in our living room.

At the time, there were 40,000 Americans living in Iran, but most of them were in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz. In our city there was a small expatriate community - only a few dozen Westerners. To me, this was an advantage; in places like Tehran, westerners tended to live in a cocoon, insulated from the local culture.

Rediscovering 'Lost' photographs

As a result of my interest in photography from school, I had a Canon TX 35 mm camera. I was also lucky to have access to an enlarger, which we set up in the basement. The icing on the cake was an automobile - so we visited a lot of the remote villages of Khorasan and Herat regions. I took about 50 rolls of film, mostly black and white negatives, plus a few color negatives and slides.

After returning to the States, I continued some amateur photography, but not professionally. My travel negatives were stashed away in a binder for almost 30 years. Earlier this year I bought a slide duplicator and started to re-explore the images, some of which I had printed in my darkroom in 1978, but some of which I ignored when reviewing my contact sheets.

This set shows some of the images I rediscovered. These comments are just my reflections on the experience as a whole; some of the most interesting experiences could not be photographed. In some cases, the image does not have a story per se, but reminds me of a time and place.

Photo 1 - The Boy on the Bus (above)
For example, there is no story around the first image, of a young boy on a bus near Mashhad. I took this on a day trip, and I paid no attention to the image in 1978. But I like the silhouetting, and the pensive stance of the boy: he seems to be looking out, hoping to find adventure or opportunity, even though a small village is probably the only world he knows.

Photo 2 - Comrades - A group of boys near Balkh

Even though Westerners were fairly common in those days, any time we arrived in a village it was a major event. A huge crowd, mostly of boys, would invariably surround us within minutes. As westerners, it felt like we were aliens visiting from another planet. The crowd would follow us around, clearing the way, everyone trying to get close to the visitor. It was not a comfortable feeling.

This shot is more intimate than most village group shots. I particularly like the spirit of camaraderie they showed by locking arms together; also the different expressions on their faces.

Photo 3 - Bamian Valley Observers

Bamian is, of course, the UNESCO world heritage site in Afghanistan. Two large Buddhas, built in the 6th centuries, are carved into cliffs, which also contains hundreds of caves in which the monks lived. In 2001, the two large Buddhas were destroyed by the Taleban.

This shot was taken on the southern side of the valley, across from the famous Buddha site. Some of the caves appear in the far distance. This photograph shows some typical stances of Afghan men waiting or resting. Most visitors to Bamian were of course interested in the statues and caves. I was fascinated by the valley itself, and the dusty hills on this side of the valley.

Photo 4 - Isfahan Copper Bazaar (color negative)

In Mashhad, where I lived, there had been an enormous, ancient bazaar surrounding the mosque complex of Imam Reza. Unfortunately, the year before I arrived, the Shah had the area about 300 hundred yards around the mosques razed to the ground, so I only heard stories about the winding maze of streets and bazaars that used to exist. This is the Bazaar-e-Bezorg, or Great Bazaar, in Isfahan. This photo comes closest to depicting what a middle eastern bazaar looks like in my mind: dark, long passageways, small side alleys, light filtering in through the dust, and a few shops open waiting for business.


Photo 5 - Back of the truck

The longest and most memorable trip I made was a 2 week trip from Herat to Kabul, via Maimana, Mazar-e-Sharif and Balkh. Most travelers went via the southern road, through Kandahar. To get from Herat to the north, we rode in the back of a covered pick-up truck. Our companions were various farmers and soldiers. One of the passengers was an old man, a mullah of some type, who was being escorted by two soldiers - we never learned exactly why he required such an escort.

In Herat, I also was privileged to attend a zikhr, a Sufi mystical ceremony. The ceremony lasted for most of the night, and involves a circle of men chanting,dancing and breathing that lead to an ecstatic state, akin to glossolalia. The famous dancing dervishes of Konya, Turkey, are closely related to what I saw. However, this was not a large institutional event, but an intimate, rustic affair with only a few dozen people, and in an isolated mosque outside of the city.

Photo 6 - Ali Qapu window

Ali Qapu is a famous building in Isfahan, a pleasure palace built by Shah Abbas in the 16-17th centuries AD. It is noted for a music room, which has hundreds of decorated plaster cabinets which are said to enhance the room's acoustics. I found this cleaner's stash in a corner of the palace, and was struck by the casualness of these humble tools in an opulent setting.

This closing shot seems to come out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. Unfortunately, the happy ending is not in this story. After the hostage crisis of 1979-80, Iran fought a brutal war against Iraq. Through most of the 1980s, thousands of soldiers, including young boys, perished in battles that went first one way and then the other. The same went Afghanistan: there were 30 years of battles with the Soviet occupation, the Taleban and finally the recent wars on terror.

I was young enough myself in 1978, but when I see photographs of 8 year old children in these pictures, I wonder how many of them are alive today.

I plan to continue to explore these negatives in coming months. While going through them for this project, I found many images I want to scan and enlarge. I'm sure I missed a lot of great shots back in the 70s.